Tired of globalisation?

By Alex Singleton | 4 November 2005

The new issue of The Economist is excellent, and it especially appeals to us here at the Globalisation Institute because it contains a survey of microcredit - or "capitalism for the poor" as the magazine's cover describes it.

The magazine also has a very interesting editorial. Echoing a speech at the Globalisation Institute by the magazine's Editor-in-Chief, it says that globalisation is needed more than ever - even if some politicians are getting tired of it:

Frederic Bastiat, who was that rarest of creatures, a French free-market economist, wrote to this newspaper in 1846 to express a noble and romantic hope: "May all the nations soon throw down the barriers which separate them." Those words were echoed 125 years later by the call of John Lennon, who was not an economist but a rather successful global capitalist, to "imagine there's no countries". As he said in his 1971 song, it isn't hard to do. But despite the spectacular rise in living standards that has occurred as barriers between nations have fallen, and despite the resulting escape from poverty by hundreds of millions of people in those places that have joined the world economy, it is still hard to convince publics and politicians of the merits of openness. Now, once again, a queue is forming to denounce openness - ie, globalisation. It is putting at risk the next big advance in trade liberalisation and the next big reduction in poverty in the developing countries.